Daddy Eoff's first blog post!

Hello all! This is daddy Eoff’s first time to type in the blog. I have to admit this experience has been so meaningful to me and has really opened my eyes to this wonderful culture. As I’ve been here I’ve really hardly seen any heavy set people here, but they sure do notice me (ha ha). When we were picking up our son in Can Tho we had went shopping with the other couples and in the market a little girl came up to me and patted my stomach. She said “baby”! Everyone just laughed and I said no its budda and she said no it’s a baby. This would not be my last experience of this culture having fun with my belly. As the ladies stayed on the bus as we crossed the river to go back to HCMC, the guys had to walk through stockades again to ride the regular way. As we were walking through the gate the gate guard grabbed my arm and rubbed my belly and laughed.

This experience has been so fun. I now really want to experience more around the world. The food has been really tough to find things I like, but I think I’ve lost a few pounds in the process. There is allot of restaurants that serve western style food, but based on how they think it is. They cook all the meat very lightly and I think my steak was still moving yesterday at dinner. Stacy and I have found this 1 meal we both love and it’s at this restaurant called Limongrass (Awesome). Since we try put Howie to bed at 6:00PM every night it’s up to me to go and get us some food and bring it back to the room. Limongrass is just a block away and we gotten this spicy grilled chicken they make twice now.

Everyone here for the most part drive mopads (50cc), you’re not required to have a driver’s license at that size of engine. When I go out to do an arrant for Stacy to pickup something for Howie I got this 1 guy who just waits for me every time. Its so funny me riding on his mopad just down the block or 2, but I don’t have the heart to keep telling him no anymore, he try’s so hard and he is a very nice guy. It’s a site to see though cause it looks the mopad is shooting off in the air with me on the back (ha ha).

Howie is everything I expected and more. His smile just melts me every morning when we get up. He is really starting to warm up to Stacy and I. He is very shy at heart, but when he shows you the few teeth he does have it will melt you too.

O yea… I have to tell you this story too. Now here at the Kimdo Hotel you can get a massage for $10.00 and that’s for an hour. I’ve only had few ever in my life, but I decided to have one here at the hotel. Well, that was an experience. I had completely forgotten were I was when I put my head through the head loop on the bench, cause 2 minutes in I was screaming like a little girl so the whole hotel could hear me. The little girl half my size was standing on my back and I still swear she broke something, but I’ll have to let my doctor check me out when I get back.

Alright 1 more story, but I debated if I would tell you guys this one cause this was so embarrassing, but it’s really funny too. This city is weird like this but each block you go on the stores seem to be selling the same stuff, so you might see 5 shoe stores in a row and the next block might have 5 video stores. Well to the story, I was on the video block and on this block they sell newly released movies that are in the theaters back home and I went to the middle store in the block (why I don’t know, but I did) so as I get there, this little girl brings me a chair to sit on so I can go through the stacks of movies she hands me. Each store/vendor will offer you a chair to set in as you look at their stuff. When I’m sitting on this chair for like 5 minutes and all of a sudden CRASH the damn chair snaps in to 50 thousand pieces and I was laid out in front of the shop and as I look around all the other video vendors come out to see what happen and I was SOOoooo embarrassed. I played it off and pointed as the little girl who gave me the chair and told them she punched me (ha ha). Most of the people are small stature and so if you can picture this little girl laughing so hard at me I felt like absolute crap.

There are actually so many other stories I could tell, but to save a little dignity I will wait to post again at a later date.